SEO TIPS: Video SEO Once Again

Any SEO expert worth their salt knows that getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever – particularly in light of how many people lost first page ranking after Panda and still haven’t figured out how to get it back while Penguin is in full swing! Google’s search and indexing algorithms keep getting more complex, and the fact that most searches now return “blended” search results, with videos and images pushed towards the top of the first page, traditional web results are having a harder job gaining or even holding their ground that they worked so hard to earn.

If this sounds like the type of problem you’re having, fear not because all is not lost.  Forrester Research has found that videos are 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking – and this has held true over the course of one year following the trend. People love to look at videos so much so that viewing videos eats up more bandwidth on a daily basis than anything else. So… make videos and use them to jumpstart your climb back to the top!

Make a video and submit it to YouTube – this is one of the easiest route to go so far as getting something out there quickly. You can even do it from nearly any smartphone. You’ll quickly be indexed into Google’s search engine and fully integrated to share on the G+ platform which is like a three run homer. However, anyone who clicks on a YouTube result is taken to YouTube, which is fine for branding but not for driving traffic back to your site which is not helpful to increase your standings for that platform in the SERPs.

It may sound funky, but video SEO does really work! Google not only finds and successfully indexes your video content, but when it dies that, Google will display your video content when specific search terms are queried! That serves both of your goals – branding and traffic! This is a tactic used by some of the biggest names in the business for a reason – it works like a magic bullet.

In order to make this work you need great video content. You can make it yourself or contract for it to be made for you. Then, submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap in Google’s Webmaster Tools so that you can streamline the process. Make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, and submit all other meta-data such as description and keywords. A lot of people forget one of the biggest steps – they forget the title tag of the page. Make sure you remember this step.

Since Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with where those links originate, get your video on display in as many places as you possibly can!  If it doesn’t take off on your first few tries, you’re not alone. The more you do it the better you will get at it. If you give people something worth watching, they will watch it – and share it and possibly come back to watch it again! That is how you generate real traffic and tons of return visitors using video SEO.